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Frequently Asked Questions

Perhaps it is because of the nature of the books that David writes, perhaps it is because David Weber's fans are unusually dedicated and inquisitive... but it seems that everyone has a question! Here are a few that David finds he gets asked most often.

If you have a question that you would like to see considered as a FAQ, please e-mail us at faq@davidweber.net. Responses will be posted if and when David can get to them. We'd love to hear from you!

I don't recall anyone saying that they aren't training dogs. I do recall saying that the melange of animal waste smells and other odiferorous distractions have made it difficult for chemical sniffers to pick explosives out of an entire city's background emissions, which is how they got past Owl on more than one occasion. On the other hand, if you will recall, it was Owl's remotes which picked up the rakurai headed to blow of Father Payter and the Patent Office.

I haven't specifically talked about dogs being used, but, then, there are (believe it or not) quite a lot of things I haven't specifically addressed in the books but which are cooking away in the background just the same. So far as sniffer dogs are concerned, this is not something you can set up with a snap of the fingers, however, and even after you have the initial program in place, getting enough of them trained and distributed is going to be a bottleneck.

Safehold

Why didn't the Terran Federation send out swarms of automated vessels with virtual personalities? Also, since Operation Ark had two separate terraforming fleets, why didn't they colonize two planets?

September 2014

What makes you think (a) that the Terran Federation was still running a capitalist economy, on the one hand, or (b) that a capitalist economy is incompatible with maximum efficiency, on the other? One can certainly argue that “capitalism” wasn’t suspended by the United States during World War Two, despite which the US managed to be the greatest industrial power in the world. There is absolutely no reason to believe that state planning/coordination and capitalism are somehow antitheses. Central planning/coordination and unfettered free market capitalism probably are incompatible, but that doesn't mean the capitalist system per se is unworkable under those circumstances

Was the Terran Federation sitting around and letting Apple and Samsung duke it out for the civilian market? Absolutely not. Was the Terran Federation backing competitive projects by Boeing and Lockheed in order to keep production lines running? Of course not. Were the Federation authorities allowing anyone to profiteer at the expense of the war effort? Puh-leese! I remember a remark made by one of the naval officers involved in the USN’s World War Two buildup. He said that money wasn’t an issue; you could get all of that you wanted. It was steel and government-assigned priorities for it which were the constraints. I guarantee you that with the human race facing extinction, those "government-assigned priorities" were pretty damned steel clad and every industrial facility in the Solar System was running at full capacity 24-hours a day.

Now, does that mean that no consumer goods whatsoever were being produced? Of course it doesn’t. And does it mean that somebody who was the equivalent of a majority stockholder in Boeing in 1942 wasn’t still able to pull strings sufficiently to acquire a single PICA for his beloved, only-child daughter? In what world do you live that you think Howard Hughes or Warren Buffet or George Soros couldn’t pull that off no matter what the priorities were? The diversion from the war effort would be so minute, so miniscule, that no one would ever notice. It literally would make exactly zero difference to the war effort, and the authorities would probably think it was an extraordinarily minor concession to someone who was an enormous net contributor to that war effort. And that someone, if I haven’t been perfectly clear, was Nimue Alban’s father. He wasn't just sitting on an inherited trust fund somewhere. He was one of the handful of wealthiest people in the entire Federation, and he'd placed his resources completely at the service at the Federation fifteen years before Nimue was born. That's why he knew just how bad the situation was long before it became evident to the majority of the human race. In fact, Elystan Alban was one of the individuals who'd been pressing the Federation to pursue a much more robust military budget well before the Gbaba were actually encountered at Crestwell's Star.

Remember that only forty-three years elapsed between that moment and Operation Ark. (Nimue was born less than sixteen years after Crestwell's Star, which is one reason her mother was able to convince herself that her father's pessimism about humanity's future was unfounded. On the surface, things just looked grim to those outside the innermost circles, not hopeless.) Now, forty-three years may seem like a long time, but given the distances involved, the nature of the threat, the fact that humanity had multiple star systems to defend, that its military machine had to be essentially built from the ground up, and that the Gbaba had a pronounced tech advantage from the outset, it really isn't all that long, and for that entire time period, humanity had its back to the wall, whether everyone realized it or not. The Federation's government had every reason to use its already existing infrastructure and economy as the basis for its war effort rather than trying to build something new on the fly. So, yes, they retained a capitalist structure under a strictly rationalized war planning authority, and it worked very well for them. In fact, for the first twenty-odd years, while a majority of the human race was still able to convince itself that the Gbaba were not, in fact, unstoppable, the retention of a familiar, known economic system — on the surface, at least — was a plus for civilian morale.

As to why the Federation might still be producing something as "frivolous" as a PICA, I've already told you that PICAs were being produced throughout this period both for industrial applications and for people who needed them for medical reasons. And unlike the purely "industrial" models, most of those PICAs being manufactured for people who needed them for medical reasons were last-generation PICAs, just as capable as Nimue’s. They were no longer being built for recreation (although there were more of those "recreational" PICAs than you might think around, most of which had been built before or during the first couple decade or so of the war against the Gbaba), but they were certainly being currently manufactured for medical purposes, and Nimue's father happened to own one of the companies which built them. So basically, he diverted a wheelchair from the Army Medical Corps's delivery queue and repurposed it as a gift for his daughter. Somehow, I don’t think FDR would’ve gotten his undergarments in a wad over that, and neither did the Terran Federation, war of extinction or not.

As for the eggs in a single basket and the second terraforming fleet.

There was never any intention for the Safehold colonization fleet to establish multiple colonies. The planners calculated that the existence of a second colony would have more than doubled the possibility that the Gbaba would stumble across one of them and realize that any colony had gotten past them, but they could have lived with that, given the survival benefits of redundancy. A far larger factor in their thinking, however, was that they had decided that they needed all 8,000,000 of those colonists in a single colony, sufficiently widely spread across the surface of humanity's new homeworld that no conceivable natural catastrophe or unanticipated environmental disaster was likely to wipe them out. (Excluding, of course, the probability of some planetary extinction event like a cometary collision, but for that to happen the human race would have had to crap out, indeed.) If they were only going to get one shot at building a new home for the human race, then they intended to give that shot the very best odds of success and survival that they could.

Even if the original mission planners had intended to provide for the possibility of a second Operation Ark colony, however, Langhorne and Bédard would have scotched it. They didn’t want an additional colony world. They wanted one world, so deeply buried the Gbaba would never find it, and the anti-tech fanatics of the command crew frankly doubted that they could have found someone as committed as they were to their vision of perpetually preventing the evolution of advanced technology to oversee the creation and establishment of a second colony outside their own direct control. They had enough trouble with Shan-wei right there on Safehold. Did they really want to empower a second Shan-wei in another colony (where they would have no control whatsoever) to undo their “hide forever” strategy? Especially since what Shan-wei wanted to do was exactly what the original mission orders had called for before Langhorne and Bédard . . . modified them. Who knew who else in the command crew might secretly have sympathized with Shan-wei and seized the opportunity to reinstitute the original mission plan?

As for the more . . . esoteric notions being floated about, there are two problems. One is that some of the people proposing them seem to be making assumptions about Federation technology based on facts not in evidence. For example, the notion that “the entire human race” could have been recorded on a molecular disk and that the necessary biological material could have been synthesized from elements extracted from asteroids. If you think the Federation was capable of that, then you are are hugely overestimating its capabilities, at least as constructed in my tech bible. The second is that most of the other proposals — for O’Neil cylinders or colonies, for example — would have left/generated a far more detectable “footprint” than a pre-technic colony at the bottom of an atmosphere. Terran Federation stealth systems were very, very good, and emissions control would obviously have been a huge part of any such colony operation. Nonetheless, the creation of a self-sustaining deep space habitat, including the resource extraction necessary if only to provide raw materials for expansion and maintenance, would be much more apparent to a scout ship passing within a few light-years of a star system than a bunch of human beings emitting carbon dioxide into a planetary atmosphere.

The Safehold colony was not the only colonization attempt the Federation made. If you recall, they got one colony fleet (that Nimue knew about) out, only to have the colony detected and destroyed (and see also my final paragraph below). The Federation was probably technologically capable of building a fleet of von Neumann probes, but they couldn’t build interstellar-capable ships with that sort of capability so small that thousands of them could evade the Gbaba blockade. (Considerations of power supply and the need to build a hyperdrive into them, if they were going to attain FTL movement, meant they had to be a certain minimal size, and that size was big enough that the sensor net the Gbaba had constructed around the Sol System would have seen them coming. That was one of the reasons Operation Ark had such a strong military escort — not simply to fight its way through the blockade, but to be big enough for its active emissions to hide the stealthed colony ships accompanying it.) Moreover, as I’ve already stated above, the Federation’s nanotech, good as it was, had not reached the point of being able to build zygotes out of any handy elements. Given another few decades, they might well have attained that level of medical tech; they didn’t have it yet, any more than they had the ability to place someone indefinitely in cryo and ultimately revive him.

The suggestion that they might have effectively sent out a fleet of PICAs (or of von Neumann ships capable of building a tech base that could then build the PICAs) with recorded human personalities is probably the most workable of the options suggested. Even that, however, would have required multiple breakouts from the Sol System, which was problematical at best.

Essentially, the Federation strategists who came up with Operation Ark put everything the Federation could spare from its defenses into a single roll of the dice that was the very best roll — had, in their estimation, the best chance of breaking out and breaking free — available to them in the time window they had. You may disagree with their analysis; you may disagree with my analysis. There were however reasons for their decisions other than abject stupidity or a desire to lose the war. Had there been time, the fleet that was sent to Safehold would have been followed by a second attempt, and a third attempt — as long as the Federation lasted — to create “hidden” colonies, with each expedition dispatched in a totally different direction from any other expeditions. The problem is that there wasn’t time, and there wasn’t a sufficient covering force to get more than one colony fleet out and away in the window available to them.

The clock ran out on the human race. It was that simple, exactly as Admiral Pei remarked to his chief of staff just before his final battle.

Safehold

Why doesn't Merlin use SNARCs to sabotage the Church's war efforts?

May 2014

Initially, Merlin didn’t use the remotes for targeted “untraceable assassinations or sabotage” because they either (1) wouldn’t have been traceless but would have been inexplicable or (2) fear of exactly the same sort of reprisals which were seen in the last book.

Remember that Merlin was flying completely under the radar and doing everything he could to stay under the radar for multiple reasons. One was to prevent the Church from seeing what was coming for as long as possible, another was to disperse the new ideas over as many legitimate, known innovators (like Howsmyn, Seamount, Sir Dustyn Olyvyr, etc.) in order to make them less suspect and more "explicable," and another — and perhaps the most important of all — was to stay away from anything which the Church could convincingly have portrayed as demonic. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid that the “demon” charge would have any effect on the people close to him, but in a civilization where the single religion’s validity is totally unquestioned, any charge of demonic influence or origins could be catastrophic. In the early days, it would have been catastrophic even within Charis; later, it would have been catastrophic in terms of undercutting the willingness of people like Nahrmahn, Gorjah, or Greyghor Stohnar to have anything to do with the "demonically assisted" Charisians. Because of that, he really couldn’t go around committing all sorts of untraceable assassinations without someone beginning to wonder just how they were magically happening. If you’ll recall, he actually considered the possibility of assassinating Hektor by using two or three (or several) of the SNARC parasites to basically set off a thermite charge in his inner ear. He rejected it for two reasons (1) because any trained healer/surgeon who examined Hektor would realize that something very peculiar had happened at a very convenient time for Cayleb Ahrmahk and the Empire of Charis, and (2) because he didn’t – and doesn’t — want to get into the habit of going around assassinating anyone who seems to him to be an obstacle to his plans.

By the time of the last book, the Church has gotten around to officially labeling Merlin a demon, anyway, which leaves them with the problem of where the true seijins which the Holy Writ promises will turn up to defeat genuine demons. In addition, however, by this time the Church’s credibility has been massively undermined. Or, rather, the credibility of the Group of Four and — especially — Zhaspahr Clyntahn has been hugely undermined, and not just in the Empire of Charis. Because of that, you’re seeing him using not simply his SNARCs but others of his technological goodies more offensively, as, for example, when he took out the semaphore towers to clear the way for the Great Canal Raid, or when Dialydd Mab took out the inquisitors on the canal barge in LAMA. On the other hand, we saw in MT&T Clyntahn carrying out precisely the sort of mass reprisal Merlin had feared when the powder barge exploded and neither Merlin nor any other saboteur had had a single thing to do with it.

Moreover, even though Clyntahn’s credibility has been undermined, at some point (hopefully) the Church is going to be defeated and people are going to begin looking at the “historical record” of what actually happened. Don’t forget that the big reveal about the truth where Langhorne and the creation of Safehold and the Church of God Awaiting is concerned has not happened and that it will not happen any sooner than they can possibly avoid. The reason, obviously, is for them to have the greatest possible opportunity to prepare the ground for revealing the truth. It would be a very, very bad thing if someone whose credibility hadn’t been destroyed started looking at two or three instances in which assassinations or sabotage had been so “traceless” as to leave no non-demonic explanation for them.

There are obviously some exceptions to that rule. For example, Merlin has already promised himself that if he ever gets a clean shot at Zhaspahr Clyntahn, he will take it. In the meantime, as Dialydd Mab and his friends and associates, he has a face, a persona who can carry out assassinations without anything more inexplicable than a “normal” seijin’s mystic capabilities. He is extremely unlikely to attempt to “tracelessly” sabotage foundries or manufactories, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he wants the rest of Safehold, not just Charis, to be developing those capabilities and facilities. He’s perfectly prepared to do what he can to assist them in being. . . less than efficient, shall we say (which was what he hoped to accomplish with the original Mahndrayn breech-loading rifle design), but he is not going to attempt to eliminate any innovators, even on the Church’s side. Or perhaps even especially on the Church’s side, since he’s already pretty much undermined the anti-innovation mindset in the Empire of Charis.

In theory, there are quite a number of things that Merlin could do using his SNARCs or Owl’s remotes which would hasten a Charisian victory; there is, however, nothing he has to do at this point to ensure a Charisian victory. While the Church is fully capable of producing weapons and using them in ways which will lengthen the war and increase the casualty total, there’s not really any probability at this point that they are going to be able to turn the war’s momentum around. (Absent, of course, some sort of catastrophic explosion that completely wipes out the Delthak Works. Short of the kinetic bombardment system, I can't think of any way that might be contrived, however.)

There was a significant chance of the war's momentum being reversed when what became the Army of the Sylmahn was about to hammer its way through the Sylmahn Gap, in the east, and Glacierheart was about to fall in the west. That is one of the reasons why he was willing to use his technology — which, by the way, I would point out includes every single thing he's ever done with his PICA — in order to clear the way for the canal raid. Should a similar situation arise, he would probably be prepared to use technology at least that “openly” once more.

Readers sometimes forget that while Merlin loves his Charisian allies, regards them as the family Nimue Alban never had in the face of the Gbaba onslaught, his and Nimue’s primary mission is to break the Church of God Awaiting’s stranglehold on Safeholdian society and — even more importantly — on technological advancement. He bleeds inside for every single human being killed in the religious war raging across Safehold, but in the final analysis, Gray Harbor, Cayleb, Sharleyan, and Maikel Staynair are all absolutely correct when they say that Clyntahn would have launched a war against Charis whether or not Merlin had ever waked up on Safehold. Moreover, it’s going to take something as catastrophic as the Jihad to break that technological stasis and keep it broken, and in that regard, the longer the war lasts (in very cold-blooded terms) the better for Merlin’s true mission. I’m not saying that he has reasoned it out that way, but those considerations underlie every single decision he’s made. And, if you’ll recall, when he rescued the kids from the krakens in OAR, and when he rescued Sharleyan from assassination in BHD, he told himself the entire time he was doing it that he couldn’t risk doing it. In those instances, he allowed his heart to overrule his head, but he knows that’s exactly what he did. It was simply something he couldn’t not do, but the sort of things which are being suggested here — traceless assassinations, traceless acts of sabotage, etc. — are things he doesn’t have to do, things he isn’t driven by his heart over his head to do, and things which might actively impede his primary object.

I’m sure some readers will insist that he ought to do them anyway. My response is that he is already operating extremely effectively against the Church and the Proscriptions and that he isn’t going to do anything to muck that up.

Safehold

Given the sort of attention Merlin's appearance draws, what sort of ethnical distribution is there on Safehold? (Asked Sat Dec 07, 2013)

December 2013

Not quite correct. The darkness of Nimue's/Merlin's eyes is pretty remarkable anywhere on Safehold; they got the huge degree of notice they did early in the books because that coloration is unheard of in native Charisians, however. By and large, the people of Safehold tend to a sort of warm beige coloration, rather like that of my beautiful Cambodian born twin daughters, but the northern portions of both Havens, in particular, have very extreme winters and lighter complexons and blue and gray eyes are much more common there. Blonds and true redheads like Paityr Wylsynn are quite rare even on the Mainland, however, and most people who are described in the books as "fair haired" are generally more of a very light brown or sandy --- or honey --- blond than your true golden or platinum blond. You'll come across an occasional character described as "golden haired," but you should also notice that they're very uncommon.

Chisholm's winters aren't quite up to Mainland standards for cold, but they're in the running and Chisholmians tend more towards the same sort of "northern" genotype. Emerald and Corisande, even more than Charis, tend to have equatorial climates, with darker coloration being the norm there, hence the comments about Irys' mother's exotic coloration and the comments on her own eye color. Harchong was initially heavily Asiatic (and especially Chinese) when it was first settled and continues to demonstrate that genotype pretty strongly. More "Nordic" coloration is sometimes (rarely) found in Northern Harchong, and the "ethnicity" of names and coloration should not be taken to imply that Harchong today is any particular era of historical China. I think of it more as a fusion of medieval Russian social norms mixed with a Mandarinate bureaucracy, in fact.

By and large, the populations originally settled by the Ark command crew were fairly homogenized. Harchong was something of an exception, but that was largely because the initial population had been drawn fairly proportionately from all area of Old Earth, there were a lot of Chinese, and China had specifically requested that even though their colonists were going to lose all memory of technology they retain as much as possible of their cultural heritage. Most of the other Old Earth ethnicities and groups were less concerned with that issue, however, and Harchong lost most of its Chinese "identity" anyway (aside from the heritage of Chinese names and naming conventions) when Langhorne and Bedard rewrote their memories so much more completely than anyone on Old Earth had intended.

There are quite a few echoes of Old Earth still rattling around the planet, but thanks in no small part of Langhorne's and Bedard's personal prejudices (and their own backgrounds, which they leaned on heavily when restructuring the memories of the Adams and Eves), a very "Western" blend of culture was imposed on the planetary population from the outset. Remember that they wanted everyone starting from the same cultural and belief template, and they used the one with which they were most familiar as its foundation. One might, I suppose, argue that this is the ultimate case of "Western Imperialism," although I didn't really intend to make any statements in that direction, I promise!

It's not the case that ethnicity in names has disappeared on Safehold, however. Whoever it was that suggested there were no Hispanic names in the mix seems to have missed a few (like Faidel Ahlverez, for example), but that's probably in part because of the altered spellings. There are, in fact, names from almost every cultural group, but they are (admittedly) biased towards "Western" names (outside Harchong, at any rate).

In general, you can think of the Safeholdian population as having "smoothed out" the extremes of genetic diversity on Old Earth (with the exception of Harchong) when the planet was first settled. For the most part, that smoothing out has continued over the centuries since, but the same environmental factors which selected for differences in things like skin pigmentation and eye coloration have been in play for the better part of a thousand years, as well. Hence the difference between "Northern" and "Out Island" appearances.

The Commodore never saw the original OBS [orbital bombardment system] coming for a very good reason, which I didn't really intend to share with you at this point, but . . . .

By the time the OBS was deployed, all but one of the colony's ships had been disposed of (as per the original operations plan) by dropping them into the local sun once they were no longer needed. The ship which remained had been Langhorne's flagship all along and he'd been very careful about vetting and reassigning shipboard personnel while Kau-Yung and Shan-Wei were off prepping the planet. By the time he came to join them, he'd had several years to weed out any potential weak spots in the crew.

Now, these were big honking ships, and his flagship had been chosen (and hung onto until last) in part because it was one of the main fabrication vessels --- that is, it represented a very impressive industrial base. Officially, it was retained till last in case something unexpected came up on Safehold which would require industrial support to rectify. There were no "system defenses" as such any longer, since they were now committed to staying on Safehold no matter what might happen and the small number of relatively light warships Kau-Yung had retained had been destroyed (for the same reasons as the rest of the colony fleet), since they would have been totally inadequate to defend the planet anyway. The military forces which remained under Kau-Yung's command essentially consisted by that time of a handful of passive sensor platforms (which were looking out of the system and not inward) and the ex-Navy personnel who were now part of the command crew and served more as police than any sort of serious military force. Don't forget that the entire command crew (less those in the Alexandria Enclave) were in on Langhorne's basic plan, which came to . . . lots of people. Exactly how many "lots of people" is something I don't intend to tell you just now. There were enough of them to require policing, and Kau-Yung's people would also have been in charge of disaster relief or any other emergency that came along.

Langhorne and his inner circle were well aware of how loyal to Kau-Yung his own people were, and despite the deep estrangement between him and Shan-Wei (which most of the "archangels" accepted as genuine) Langhorne was less than confident that Kau-Yung would be in favor of turning her and all the rest of the Alexandrians into ground zero for a kinetic strike. For that matter, Langhorne was far from certain that all the rest of the command crew would think it was a good idea to commit the mass murder of colleagues they'd known and worked with for decades, even if they had reached a point of bone-deep philosophical disagreement.

As a result of that uncertainty on his part, the original OBS was a relatively simple (and cheap) system built for a single purpose --- to take out the entire Alexandria Enclave in a single strike --- and it was intended to do so so quickly that neither Kau-Yung and his loyalists among the ex-Navy personnel nor any other "archangels" who might have disagreed with the plan would be able to prevent it from happening. In other words, the idea was to burn out the source of "dangerous contamination" in a single stroke and present them with a fait accompli, after which they would have little choice but to accept Langhorne's plans --- and actions --- as a "done deal." To that end, the OBS was also built under high conditions of secrecy in one of the modules aboard the flagship commanded and staffed by people personally loyal to Langhorne. Its existence was concealed not just from Kau-Yung, but from everyone outside Langhorne's immediate close circle of utterly trusted subordinates, and it wasn't deployed from inside the module in which it had been built until literally no more than a very few hours from when it was used. As a result, there was no real "window" in which Kau-Yung might have seen what was coming and taken steps to prevent it.

Safehold

What kind of mobility and logistics is available on Safehold compared to human history? (Asked Wed Oct 30, 2013)

December 2013

Actually, this appears to be a[nother] point upon which people have missed quite a few small implications of text comments on the tech available to Safehold. Things like Pasqualization [pasteurization], canned foods, etc. The Safeholdian food preservation industry is much farther advanced than some people seem to be assuming, despite the fact that it is (traditionally) far more of a "muscle-powered" affair than would have been the case for an equivalent level of sophistication on Earth. In connection with this, I would also point out that by the time of the American Civil War dehydrated milk, dried vegetables, and quite a few other items/techniques needed to produce relatively low-bulk rations were available. Because low-bulk/low-weight substitutes for much of the human-consumed supplies are available, the imbalance between required rations and required fodder is even more pronounced than some people seem to be assuming. In other words, do not judge the weight, portability, and/or preservation requirements of an army's logistics train by the "Elizabethan" tech model some people still seem to apply as the default tech level for pre-Merlin Safehold.

The biggest classical pre-motorization problem the QMG faces on Safehold is the need for fodder, which is especially a factor in areas like much of the SR where food supplies have been deliberately destroyed and so high a percentage of normal cropland simply wasn't planted following the Sword of Schueler. Even there, Safeholdian armies have a huge advantage in the form of the draft dragon because of its combination of size, basic physiognomy, and efficiency of digestion. Using grain(s) as the base fodder helps enormously in terms of transporting feed because it concentrates much more energy in a smaller bulk than grass or hay does, but you still have to have a certain percentage of roughage (best supplied by hay) to maintain health. I think the rule of thumb is that a horse, for example, needs 1-2% of bodyweight in roughage every day and somewhere around 3% of bodyweight total for food. For a 1,000-pound draft horse, that would be about 30 pounds total food, of which around 15 pounds should be roughage, and (if I recall correctly) a "standard" square bale of hay here in the States runs to about 50 pounds. So assuming no free-growing grass for grazing (or a forced march in which there's no time to turn them out to graze), you need about a third of a bale per draft horse per day. The other 15 pounds or so can be lowered by using very high energy grains for fodder, and high-quality hay (such as alfalfa, which is sort of the gold standard for hay) reduces the total amount of roughage required, as well. Of course, the mule (which is also known on Safehold) requires only about 1/3 as much grain as a horse of the same bodyweight, so a big 1,000-pound draft mule would require only about 10 pounds of grain and slightly less roughage, as well, meaning you could feed one of them for a day on about half the total weight/bulk of food your draft horse would require. (Dragons also require roughage, but not quite as high a percentage. The difference isn't great enough to have much effect on the bulk and/or weight of the required fodder.)

As a general rule, the US Army during the animal-traction period rated draft animals on the basis that (assuming a 10-hour draft period) 1 ox could pull about 1,500 pounds; 1 mule could pull about 750 pounds, and 1 horse could pull 250-300 pounds. For comparison, a typical Western working ox would weigh about 2,000 pounds, but the oxen the Army was using at this time averaged about 1,700 pounds, which meant that the ox’s sustained draft was roughly equal to its own weight. The typical heavy draft mule would weigh around 1000 pounds, so they it could pull about 75% of its weight, while a horse could pull only about 40 percent of its own weight. By the same token, horse or a mule could carry about 20% of its bodyweight while an ox could carry about 25% of its own body weight. These numbers were all calculated for off-road transportation; on-road they would be substantially higher. They were also calculated on an empirical basis, by observing demonstrated performance in the field, and should therefore be considered pretty reliable. As a check on them, there is a considerable amount of ongoing research into draft animals for use in Third World economies. The current research considers a “burst draft” number and a “sustained draft” number. Oxen have the highest values in each category, with a “burst” number of about 6 times their bodyweight (that is, a 2,000-pound ox would have a “burst draft” value of about 12,000 pounds) and a “sustained draft” of about 5,000 pounds using the modern measure, which (as nearly as I could determine) is a road value, not cross-country, which would fit fairly well with the empirical numbers from above. (That is, the numbers cross-country should be about 1/3 of what they would be on a decent road.) The reason that the numbers for oxen are higher than for horses has a lot to do with the physiology of the animals. Put most simply, an ox’s legs, body form, and musculature are “lower set” and better suited to pulling heavier loads for longer distances but at a substantially lower rate of speed.

A Safeholdian draft dragon has a lower “burst” capability (expressed as a percentage of its own bodyweight) than an ox, but a higher sustained capability because it has an additional set of legs. Oxen can carry (as opposed to pull) a higher percentage of their bodyweight than horses can (again, because of physiology), but dragons can carry an even higher percentage (30-35%) than most oxen can. On Safehold, this isn’t as critical as it might be here on Earth, because oxen are virtually never used, since the dragon is available and is a much more efficient proposition, so what we really need to be comparing them to in terms of performance is the horse or the mule. I’ve included the ox in the current discussion primarily as a “real-life” comparison for the aforesaid horses and mules, however.

A dragon has a “burst” capability of approximately 5.5 times its own bodyweight and a “sustained” capability of about 4.5 times its own bodyweight, and weighs approximately 15,000 pounds. I’ve used a value of 4 times that bodyweight in the books simply to be sure I was allowing a “fudge factor” for dragons which are smaller and/or larger than the average and allow for those which lose body mass while being worked intensively. This happens with all draft animals and is allowed for in the US Army estimates I used above. It is not allowed for in all of the more recent studies I’ve seen, although the majority of them which consider feed requirements do consider the problem at least obliquely, since the intensity of the animal’s labor also affects the efficiency of its digestion.

What this means is that to transport 60 tons of supplies 100 miles along a (good) road would require approximately 145.5 horses, 53.3 mules, or 2 dragons. The horses would require about 4,362 pounds of food per day; the mules would require about 2,180 pounds; the dragons would require only 1,200 pounds, or little more than half the amount the mules would need. (Although oxen don’t really come into this equation, because — as I said — they aren’t much used on Safehold, you’d need about 24 of them to move the same load, albeit at a much lower rate of speed, and they would consume about 1,900 pounds of food.) The horses (and mules) would require about 27 hours to travel 100 miles; the ox would require about 40 hours; the dragon would require approximately 20 hours. (Note: these figures are for continuous hours. All of the various critters involved would require periodic rest stops, not to mention the time required to consume the fodder discussed above.) The dragon’s advantage over the mule or (especially) horse in terms of pounds of fodder per mile traveled would come close to doubling across country, without a road net; its advantage would be no more than about 1.5 greater than for oxen.

Just as a matter of comparison, the famous M35 “deuce and a half” truck of the US Army can carry about 10,000 pounds of cargo and has a “highway” mileage of about 11 miles per gallon, so to transport 60 tons of cargo 100 miles would require 12 of them, each of which would burn roughly 9.1 gallons of gasoline, or a total of 109.2 gallons. A gallon of gasoline weighs about 6.2 pounds per gallon, so the gasoline required to transport our 60 tons for 100 miles would weigh 675.8 pounds, or about 56% of the “fuel cost” for the dragons. Of course, the volume that fuel would take up would be much lower and the entire trip would take a bit less than 2 hours or approximately 10 percent as long as the dragons would take. The advantage over horse or even mule-drawn transport is obviously much greater, and the US Army didn’t have access to Safeholdian dragons, unfortunately, which is probably why it violated the Proscriptions and came up with its infernal creation.

Nonetheless, I think it should be evident from the above that Safeholdian armies’ logistical capabilities come far closer to those of a mechanized era than even late 19th-century Earth-style animal traction could have. Of course, the extent to which that is true depends in no small part on how thoroughly and how well the capabilities of Safeholdian animal traction has been integrated into a given army’s transport system, and not all Safeholdian armies are equal in that respect by any stretch of the imagination.

Safehold

Currency exchange rates circa 896. (Posted Tue Aug 13, 2013)

December 2013

I see that people have been discussing currency and currency values, so I thought I’d give you the enclosed table. This reflects cumulative changes in currency exchange rates over a five-year period; it does not show you the peaks and valleys involved in those changes. Nor does it show you the purchasing power of the various currencies in terms of US dollars, which I have established for my own use as of 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, and 2000.

I should point out that the currency units used here are all marks. Prior to the jihad, Temple marks were (you should pardon the expression) the “gold standard” of Safehold. National units minted their own coins simply to put enough currency into circulation, and the exchange rate reflected both the amount of bullion in any given coin (there are different bullion contents for several of them, most notably for Sodar and Harchong, if only because there were no truly standardized planetwide units of measure and weight) as well as the users’ faith in the amount of bullion (the prohibitions of the Writ vis-a-vis debasement of the coinage notwithstanding). It should also be noted, however, that there have always been silver and copper (actually bronze) marks in circulation. Generally speaking, there are 20 silver marks (or “silvers”) in a gold mark and 5 copper marks in each silver mark (or 100 “coppers” in a gold mark). Paper notes have been in circulation for decades (or longer) on Safehold, as well, but the provisions of the Writ which forbid debasing the currency have always been interpreted to mean that while paper notes may be issued by a bank, a nation, an archbishopric, or Mother Church herself, the issuing institution cannot issue notes for more bullion than it has actually on hand. In other words, there is no elasticity in the “paper money” supply. At the same time, paper notes are considered less durable than coins (they can, after all, be burned) and easier to counterfeit (which, despite the Writ’s prohibition on debasing the currency is still done by some criminals), and merchants and bankers (who have had a much closer view than the general public of the realities behind Church and secular corruption) have less confidence that “unbacked” banknotes won’t be issued anyway. All of these are reasons that the majority of transactions have still been carried out in coin. The primary function of these banknotes has been for transactions between banking institutions and treasuries rather than in the marketplace.

In addition to actual banknotes, as defined above, however, institutions may also issue notes which are not backed by actual bullion on hand. These promissory notes are almost always issued on an interest-bearing basis. That is, those who accept the promissory notes in the sale of goods or services do so (in theory, at least) of their own free choice and at their own risk and return for a promised value when the note comes to term in excess of its face value at the time they accepted it. These are much more likely to be used in the marketplace than the banknotes defined above, but are also subject to a certain discount rate by sellers, whether this is openly acknowledged or not.

This is partly reflected in the exchange rates below, because the total amount of currency in circulation includes coins (in gold, silver, and copper), paper notes issued against bullion reserves, and interest bearing promissory notes. The relative values assigned to the currencies in the table below reflect the willingness of sellers to accept all three of the above. One reason for the Charisian mark’s climb in value as opposed to the Church of God Awaiting’s mark is that the Church’s creditors are beginning to cherish serious reservations about notes issued against bullion and promissory notes, whereas Charis is being regarded (whatever the Church might think about it) as a better investment. In short, this shift in value reflects the fact that the Safeholdian marketplace has come to the conclusion that the jihad is most likely to end in the defeat of Mother Church, at least in so far as the Temple’s ability to crush the Empire of Charis is concerned. No one has pointed this out to Clyntahn, needless to say, but were it not for the coercive power of the Church and the Inquisition, the value of the Church’s and Temple Lands’ marks (especially its banknotes and promissory notes) would have fallen considerably further against the Charisian mark.

Eventually, the Charisian, Chisholmian, Emeraldian, Tarotisian, and Corisandian marks will be folded into a single Imperial Mark, but Cayleb and Sharleyan have no desire to pursue any fiscal policies that might shake the faith of the merchants and bankers in the Empire’s constituent realms in the middle of a war.

With PICAs, AIs, human-machine interfacing, and the like, how could the humans lose to the Gbaba? They had achieved the singularity, and thus could easily produce their way to victory. (Asked Sat Jul 20, 2013)

December 2013

You need to reflect upon the fact that the reference was specifically for “most people” and to “full service” PICAs, if you will. In other words, the ones that are faithful analogues of a human original except for the fact that they are immensely stronger, have better reflexes, perfect memory, etc., and were perceived as mobile extensions of their original.

The Terran Federation was lousy with specialized PICAs which were routinely used by people working in high threat environments, etc., and provision of last-generation PICA capability for those who were physically disabled was also routine. In terms of military hardware, the uploading of human awarenesses and human memories into virtual realities for R&D, for the control of warships, fortresses, and system defense nets was widespread, but not as widespread — in tactical applications – as the use of genuine AIs. (Under the Federation's legal codes, AIs were on a different plane from electronic humans in several ways, primarily because AIs were regarded as artificial constructs which could be and were designed to serve specific functions which often precluded the possibility or even the concept of self-preservation. You might recall Nimue/Merlin's reflections on why Owl had such limited self-awareness and personality in the first place.)

There were all sorts of other reasons for the greater reliance on human-managed AIs than on PICAs or completely electronic humans, including the sheer expense of last-generation PICAs and a few very unhappy experiences in the early days of their availability. There are also some factors involved that can’t really be discussed at this point because of their bearing on elements of the story line that will never be resolved on Safehold, but in general there was no prejudice against the combination of human and electronic consciousnesses. Virtual personalities were regarded as individuals in their own rights; the restriction on PICAs — the necessity for the PICA’s memories and experiences to be uploaded to (i.e., be combined with) the human original — was required because the PICA was not regarded as an individual but rather as a peripheral being operated by the human original. If there was no “human original,” then there was no responsibility for the PICA to be downloaded to it (obviously), and I never intended to imply that someone who for medical reasons (or whatever, not be construed as precluding philosophical reasons) elected to transfer completely into a PICA would be erased every 10 days if he/she failed to report some sort of central policing authority. Unless one chose to make the transition permanent, however, the legal code continued to regard the human original as the only actual personality (since the requirement to upload effectively “overwrote” the original with the combined experience PICA and original). If a virtual personality was “manumitted” by the human original – and there was a legal procedure for doing just that — it became a complete, self-realized individual in the eyes of the law, with all of these civil rights and legal obligations of any other individual citizen of the Federation. Unless it was manumitted, however, the human original remained legally responsible for any of its actions. Put another way, the human original and the PICA were regarded as a single entity by the law and, that being the case, the law required that the separate aspects of that single entity be periodically merged to ensure that remained a single entity.

Now, I personally cherish certain doubts about the attainability of the singularity and its advantages/promises. At the same time, I’m certainly prepared to acknowledge that my reservations may or may not be well taken. I’ve already discussed in past posts on this forum several reasons why the Federation didn’t simply manufacture a bazillion PICAs in order to man vast fleets warships which could be sent off overwhelm the Gbaba. One reason, frankly, was that manpower was never Federation’s military, and one reason it wasn’t was that Federation military hardware required very, very little in the way of flesh-and-blood human personnel because (a) the Federation had very, very capable AIs and (b) the Federation already made significant use of uploaded human beings. As far as other war-fighting technologies — nano weapons, von neumann machines, etc. — are concerned, I’ve never said they weren’t used; I simply said whatever was used was insufficient to stave off ultimate defeat.

You also have to bear in mind that you’re seeing the Federation through the lens of Safehold. For example, there’s been mention by Merlin on more than one occasion that the reason humans on Safehold can’t use the NEAT technology for education is that none of them have the neural receptors they would have had had they been citizens of the Federation. I don’t believe that Merlin ever said that education was the only reason that citizens of the Federation had those receptors. In fact, citizens of the Federation routinely interfaced directly with computers, AIs, etc. Safehold, on the other hand, was intended — deliberately — to possess no advanced technology, including virtual personalities, PICAs, neural receptors, etc., etc. This is the primary reason that the original colonists volunteered to have all memory of that technology erased during their voyage to Safehold, although none of them ever anticipated what Langhorne and Bédard substitute for their original memories.

What I suppose I’m trying to say here is that you ought not to assume on the basis of the legal provisions attached to a specific use of a PICA that you understand all of the nuances of a Federation which you have seen only in historical perspective after that Federation had ceased to exist. Had I not deliberately allowed for the disablement of Merlin’s high-speed data port, you might have a rather different perspective on the interaction of human beings, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality as practiced by the Federation. This is not to say that I did not envision a Federation in which humanity had chosen — by and large – to preserve its humanity as distinct from the machine or from human-machine fusion. I did, however, envision one in which that humanity was far more intimately involved and . . . intertwined with its technological artifacts then you appear to have been assuming based on the single passage you cited.

Safehold

Why didn't King Haarahld move to defeat the forces in their ports instead of Darcos Sound? (Asked Fri May 31, 2013)

December 2013

In no particular order:

(1) Haarahld could not possibly move against any force launched against Charis by the Church until that force had first moved against Charis. You do remember the Church? The all-powerful, Mother of Men, servant of God, authorized by the Archangels, keeper of souls, and general all round font of wisdom and justice? That Church? Haarahld understood (even better than Merlin, who didn’t know anything about the brethren of Saint Zherneau at that point, realized he did) that no secular realm could even think about moving against any Church-supported, Church-mandated alliance except in self-evident self-defense. That meant he had to wait until (A) he had a plausible means of knowing that the attack was coming which could be publicly demonstrated and (B) until the forces and people committed to that attack were unequivocably identified. Therefore, he literally could not attack Emerald until he “discovered” Emerald’s intention to attack Charis, and he needed the Corisandian fleet elements in Emeraldian waters before he could do that. You may remember the lengths that he (or Cayleb, at least) went to to suggest that King Gorjah’s court had been the source of the information that sent the galleons off to meet Malikai and White Ford so far from home. However, it’s worth noting that even though Charis ostensibly had that advanced warning, Cayleb didn’t actually attack until well after the Corisandian galleys had rendezvoused with the Emeraldian galleys and provided Haarahld with the proof that he was fighting a defensive war rather than impiously raising his merely mortal hand against Mother Church in blasphemous, unprovoked defiance of God's will. (And I should point out that the Corisandian and Chisholmian contingents actually arrived at Eraystor as a joint force, little though they liked one another. They didn’t straggle in over a period of five-days or arrive separately which means that your "engage them individually at sea" strategy would have put him up against a larger force than you appear to be assuming.)

(2) His ability to find and engage the Corisandian and Chisholmian elements at sea would have been far from certain. Of course, he could have retained Merlin aboard his flagship as his own tame wizard, rather than sending him off with Cayleb, but he had what were in his opinion (and mine) enormously better reasons to send Cayleb and the galleons (and Merlin) off to Armageddon Reef. See below.

(3) His galley fleet was considerably weaker than its “paper” strength thanks to the diversions of men, matériel, and artillery to the galleons. His numerical advantage over the Corisandian/Chisholmian fleet (which was traveling in company) was not as large as you appear to be thinking, and he could pretty much have counted on its getting smaller with the losses he would almost inevitably take against the Eraystor fortifications (and the Emeraldian Navy) if he’d gone into Eraystor Bay after Nahrmahn’s ships. See below.

(4) There were really good and sound reasons for him not to attack Eraystor’s port fortifications with only his understrength galley fleet. They were called guns. Lots of guns. The fact that I didn’t take you on a tour of the batteries certainly shouldn’t suggest they weren’t there, unless you can think of another reason why he wasn’t sending in fire ships against the combined fleets? I promise you it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart or because he’d forgotten to bring along the marshmallows. I could have done a chapter with his discussing why he couldn’t attack the fortifications in an “As you know, Bob” sort of format, but I personally took it as a given that the Eraystor naval facilities, at least, were reasonably well fortified and provided with artillery. No, it wasn't the "modern" artillery aboard the Charisian galleons, but then his galleys didn't have "modern" artillery, either. They would have been forced to engage old-style artillery using old-style tactics, aside from the single squadron armed with carronades, and that would have been a seriously losing proposition. And there were very good reasons why he didn't use the galleons against those fortifications. See below.

(5) Sending the galleon fleet off to intercept the Dohlaran and Tarotisian fleet elements off Armageddon Reef allowed him to use them under conditions which would maximize their advantages, minimize their disadvantages vis-à-vis galleys, and put the enemy galley fleet at a critical disadvantage. In shallower, more confined waters, where the galleys could make better use of their greater speed and mobility, the galleons’ combat advantages would have been considerably less. Now, it can certainly be argued — after the fact — that the galleons proved capable of decisive action at Darcos Sound, which is arguably “confined waters,” but it was one heck of a lot less confined than Eraystor Bay would have been. Moreover, for all of Haarahld’s faith in Merlin, and all the fact that he belonged to the inner circle, neither he nor any other Safeholdian had ever seen galleons in combat before. He was, therefore, not about to risk finding out that their artillery was not in fact superior to the Emeraldian artillery protecting the fleet anchorages or automatically assume that they would have been as successful against galleys in the sorts of waters galleys had been designed to fight in until that fact had been demonstrated in practice.

(6) Haarahld was, indeed, intelligent enough to recognize the advantages in defeating his enemy in detail. That is, in fact, exactly what he did. He chose to hit the combined Dohlaran-Tarotisian force at its most vulnerable and when it would be psychologically least prepared for combat. By doing so, he preserved the secret of the galleons’ broadside armaments until they had already been used to decisively blunt and defeat that arm of the Church’s offensive. Had he used them earlier and had even a single galley gotten away to Tarot and gained access to the semaphore system, the Dohlarans would certainly have been diverted to Tarot, which would have made that portion of the Church’s attack force much, much harder to get at.

(7) If the galleons proved as effective in combat as everyone on the Charisian side hoped they would, then he would be able to engage the combined galley fleet of the entire “northern force” in a single body and almost certainly crush it once Cayleb returned from Armageddon Reef. He intended from the beginning to amass a crushing superiority before he finally engaged them, although he didn’t realize until Merlin’s visit to his flagship that it would be possible to coordinate a genuine pincer attack against Black Water’s command. His original plan was to combine the galley and galleon fleets together into a single, irresistible hammer, and use that hammer to absolutely demolish the naval power of his foes in order to achieve what he did achieve in the end: a crushing Charisian sense of moral superiority and élan.

(8) Like Admiral Jellicoe, Haarahld could lose the war in an afternoon if he got unlucky against his opponents. As long as his fleet was in being and at sea, his enemies couldn’t land a significant invasion force in Charis. They had to destroy his fleet to accomplish their strategic goal; he merely had to keep his fleet intact to accomplish his strategic goal and avoid the invasion of Charis before Cayleb returned with the galleon fleet to reinforce them. In addition, of course, by keeping his fleet in being and keeping Black Water chasing him, he was able to play anvil to Cayleb’s hammer when the galleon fleet did return.

I’m sure I could adduce additional reasons to dispute your assumption that Haarahld failed to be “as sneaky as his enemies knew him to be.” The problem is that if you don’t already grasp the reasons why he had to (a) stand on the defensive until he was clearly the attacked party, (b) avoid losses to the Eraystor defenses, (c) employ his galleons for the first time under conditions which would give them the maximum tactical advantages and maximize the shock effect of being hit so far from home by a totally new and completely unexpected naval force; and (d) attain the maximum devastation of any opposing navy’s morale when it contemplated fighting the Royal Charisian Navy, then I doubt I’m going to be able to explain it to you.

Safehold

Why can't Charis have electricity? (Asked Sun May 12, 2013)

December 2013

Okay, a few points, some of which I'm pretty sure I've addressed before.

(1) You could have a damned large industrial process on a planet, including use of electricity in many and manifold ways, without producing a big enough electromagnetic signature to be easily picked out against the background noise of any star.

(2) Any signature you were radiating could expand only at the speed of light, attenuating the entire way.

(3) Safehold is hundreds of light years beyond the Gbaba's sphere, and the overwhelming evidence at the time of the Gbaba's attack on humanity was that the Gbaba do not aggressively patrol beyond the borders of their own sphere. Rather, they react to incursions into their sphere with the equivalent of a "hot pursuit" response and the extermination of the interloper to be sure he'll never come back. This means that even if Safehold was radiating radio energy out the wahzoo, it would be centuries — quite a few of them, in fact — before any of their radiated energy could be detected by the Gbaba unless the Gbaba happened to be in the area looking for it.

Because of this, the original mission orders for Operation Ark called for a hiatus in which there would be no electromagnetic footprint from Safehold for a long enough period of time for them to be fairly confident that any actively searching Gbaba scout ships had swept through the area and gone home again. There was never any particular concern over what was going to happen after that hiatus was over, because at that time Safehold would be far enough away from any hostile detectors to be beyond threat until it had had plenty of time to rebuild and advance its technology to a "Gbaba-proof" level. (As a "historical" validation of their assumptions, the mission planners could look at the fact that Earth's radio emissions had had ample time to reach well beyond her most distant colony before the Gbaba responded. In other words, they had empirical evidence that the Gbaba hadn't detected them despite radio emissions until they entered the Gbaba's sphere.)

The basis for the Church's prohibition of anything touching on the rakurai is threefold.

First, one of the underlying assumptions of the Proscriptions is that true, large-scale technology is impossible to develop without electricity. Or, put another way, electricity is going to be developed by anybody on his way through to large-scale, advanced technology. Therefore, banning electricity effectively bans large-scale technology and serves as a warning flag that it's being developed.

Second, artificially generated and distributed electricity is something that would be readily detectable from orbit and not something likely to be confused with any natural phenomenon.

And, third, the notion of lightning as sacred and not, under any circumstances, to be profaned by mortal hands provides the permanent remembrance of not just Langhorne's existence but of the consequences of Langhorne's wrath.

Now, at the same time that Langhorne was setting up the prohibition of advanced technology, he was making provision for the "archangels" and "angels" to continue to use very advanced technology to validate their supernatural powers. Merlin's SNARCs are using shielded, stealthed communications arrays designed to hide from hostile tactical sensors — aimed against the Gbaba, at the time the SNARCs were built, but equally effective against any sensors the orbital array might mount — and walking in the footsteps of the technology Langhorne himself ruled was usable by the "archangels." Moreover, there is a quantum leap between the initial production of electricity and the highly advanced applications of it inherent in Merlin's toys. In effect, it would be relatively simple to build a protocol into the bombardment platform's sensors (assuming, of course, that the sensors are actually prepared to blast technology on the planetary surface in the first place) which differentiates between "technology so advanced it must be being used by the 'archangels'" and "technology so crude that it couldn't be being used by the 'archangels.'" If it's the latter, it needs to be smitten . . . quickly; if it's the former, leave it alone because it's being used on Langhorne's business.

In that respect, Merlin is hiding in the shadow of the original archangels. Although that, of course, assumes that all of his carefully stealthed technology is detectable in the first place. He has no intention of giving away any more detectable signature than he can avoid, of course, but from the perspective of the reader that "shadow" should always be borne in mind

As for Nimue's Cave, it's buried beneath 7.5 miles of solid rock and iron ore. During the period before her PICA woke up, the entire installation was, indeed, at absolutely minimal levels of power, and its primary power source when it came back online is a geothermal tap, so there's no betraying emission of burned hydrocarbons or neutrinos to give it away. Assuming that it was possible for Nimue to excavate a similar underground complex and install a major generating system there, and find the labor force to work in that complex without popping flags with its members about violations of the Proscriptions, then, yes, Charis could have electricity for applications which require it. Of course, digging something that size in anything less than several decades without using technology which in its self would probably trigger the arrays (assuming that they are triggerable). And, equally of course, they might find it a bit difficult to explain to the rest of their workforce where the products being produced using that electricity were coming from and how they were being produced.

The bottom line is that no one in Charis really knows whether or not generated and distributed electricity would trigger a bombardment. They suspect that it would, and in this instance they prefer to err on the side of safety, but they certainly don't know it. On the other hand, they do know that "profaning the rakurai" would represent a crossing of the Rubicon. It would be an open, explicit defiance of the Proscriptions which no one could argue away. That is something they cannot afford at this time or, indeed, at any time until after the proscriptions themselves have been successfully invalidated/overturned following the "reveal" of the truth about Langhorne and the archangels.

So while there are what you might call "technical issues" bound up in the uncertainty of how the bombardment platform would respond, there is also an overriding reason — found in the Proscriptions — why electricity is impossible. In the meantime, the electronic footprint of Merlin's stealthed recon skimmer, the SNARCs singular transmissions, the personal coms of the inner circle, etc., are extraordinarily difficult to detect in the first place and (apparently ) trapped in the filters that were established to allow the "archangels" to employ technology.

Don't know if all of that really makes it any clearer, but there it is.